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Do we have an idea of when the physical capability for vocal language originated? Other great apes have all kinds of vocalizations they can produce, and you don't need THAT many different sounds to support language.

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To answer that you'd need to know what even constitutes vocal language. There's a number of languages that make extensive use of clicks and whistles that would seem to me are pretty orthogonal to the ability to pronounce, say, English.

We know from their remains that Neanderthals would have had a rather different range of vocalizations from Homo sapiens, but that doesn't mean they didn't have structured language.

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